Frank Rijkaard began the interview by offering me a Barclays cigarette. The Dutch coach is a polite and kind man. Former team-mates like Arnold Muhren and Gerald Vanenburg talk about him with something approaching love. Even Johan Cruyff hesitates to criticise him. Rijkaard is a nice guy.

So it was a shock, early in Euro 2000, to see him erupt. He had publicly erupted only once before, at the World Cup of 1990, when as a player he was sent off for spitting at the German Rudi Voller. Outside Holland he is still known chiefly for this most uncharacteristic act, and I hereby apologise for using it as the cover photograph of a book I wrote.

Rijkaard's second eruption came ten days ago at the Dutch camp in Hoenderloo. It is his custom to address press conferences in the slow and simple speech of a kind primary school teacher talking to backward children. This time he exploded.

'When there is a Euro 2000 game on TV, I sometimes walk past my players, and I see them watching with half an eye or playing cards. In the match on TV you see everyone running the fire out of their slippers, but then you see our guys look up briefly at the television set and you hear: "What a bad game!"'

It was a perfect cameo of the Dutch professional footballer. But Rijkaard was not trying to be funny. The man who became Holland's manager as fourth or fifth choice after the last World Cup is no caretaker. He may never have coached a team before, and never have aspired to this job, but he wants to transform Dutch football. And he knows exactly how he wants to do it, because he once transformed himself.

Rijkaard was born 37 years ago in Amsterdam. His father, a gifted black footballer named Herman Rijkaard, had taken the boat from the Dutch West Indian colony of Surinam with his friend and fellow player George Gullit. Both men had married white Dutch women, and settled near one another in Amsterdam. It was years before the great rush of Surinamese immigrants that was to bring the Kluivert, Seedorf and Davids families to Holland, where they would be stuck in ghettoes. The Rijkaards and Gullits were part of a small group of middle-class Surinamese men who were accepted fairly easily into Dutch society. Ruud Gullit says he only discovered he was black when he was ten years old.

He and Rijkaard grew up playing football together on a local square, the Balboaplein, and at the DWS club of Amsterdam. Even as a teenager Gullit was the louder and more confident of the two, but experts such as Johan Cruyff thought Rijkaard the more gifted footballer. He was huge, intelligent, and could do everything with a football.

He joined Ajax, and at 18 made his debut for Holland against Switzerland. Gullit replaced him at half-time, but the Swiss commentator never noticed the switch. Holland lost the match 2-1. The Dutch team, composed of naive youngsters like Gullit, Rijkaard and Marco van Basten, lost often in those days. They failed to qualify for the World Cups of 1982 and 1986 and the European Championship of 1984.

Experts said they would never make it: pretty footballers, but lacking in bite and with a penchant for conceding silly goals. Ajax eventually decided to discard Rijkaard. They offered him to Groningen, a small club in the north of Holland, but Groningen didn't want him. The young man's reputation had been destroyed by the Ajax coach, Aad de Mos, who had said after Ajax had yet again exited the European Cup in the autumn: 'You won't win the war with boys like Rijkaard and (Gerald) Vanenburg.'

The saying has become legendary. Rijkaard told me: 'The question was: how do you deal with it? I looked in the mirror and thought: "Yes, football is about something. It's not just a game for fun." So from that moment on I began to fight, to stand my man, and after every match I could look in the mirror and say, "Good or bad, I did what was within my power".'

This sounds like the pop psychology books that Rijkaard reads. You may mock, but there is no quibbling with the results. De Mos was proved right: Rijkaard never won a war. Instead he won the European Cup twice with AC Milan and once with Ajax, and the European Championship with Holland in 1988. By the time he retired in 1995 he was one of the most respected players in football.

The Dutch team today is an eleven-man version of the young Rijkaard: pretty footballers, who lose when it counts. The one great prize most of them have won was the Champions League with Ajax in 1995, when they were led from the back by a centre-half named Rijkaard who gave them a talking-to at half-time in the final.

Now Rijkaard must motivate them again. Dutch footballers need that. Left to themselves, they tend to elevate good football above winning. Hence the Hoenderloo speech.

But Rijkaard is no Kevin Keegan, no orator. He is a man of detail. 'That's what surprises me most about Frank,' says Dennis Bergkamp, another former team-mate. 'He really knows how to analyse an opponent completely.'

Rijkaard has specific advice to impart. Much of it is on a subject the Dutch traditionally disdain: defending. He gave me a masterclass.

'As a young centre-back at Ajax, I played with Wim Jansen, and of course you learn a huge amount. I made some mistakes, because we Dutchmen want to solve situations by playing football. So we look at the ball, try to judge where it will come. Eight out of ten times it's wonderful if you intercept it. "What vision!" people say. But the other two times the ball goes in behind your back and it's really just a marking error.

'Then came the moment that I joined the squad for the European Championship of 1988 and it became clear that I'd have to play centre-back. One thing was crystal clear to me: if you're centre-back, you first of all have to perform your task.

'What I did was watch the striker very closely. If the ball went to the wing, I would touch him so that I knew if he was going forward or backwards.And then he went forward and I was with him. Very often I was lying in between when someone wanted to shoot, or I gave a little push when someone wanted to head. I mean, it doesn't always go right, but that was the intention. For me it was living proof that that is how you defend.'

Indeed: this most cultured of footballers erased strikers like Gary Lineker and Oleg Protassov from games. It is a shame he finished only third in the voting for player of the tournament, behind his more obvious team-mates Van Basten (scored five goals) and Gullit (wore long Rastafarian hair).

Rijkaard continued: 'After your career you go to matches and you see so many unnecessary goals. Because a person is just looking where the ball is and not his opponent. Well, a ball alone has never scored a goal.'

Throwing yourself in front of the ball, says Rijkaard, might sound mucky but can be the difference between winning and losing. That difference has traditionally been of little interest to the Dutch. Cruyff himself says that Holland in effect won the World Cup of 1974, even though they lost in the final, because everyone remembers their beautiful play.

Rijkaard diagrees. He grew up watching Cruyff, was coached by him at Ajax, quarrelled with him many times, eventually walked out, and landed up at AC Milan. There he became something of an Italian. Even today he is distinguished among the casual Dutch by his tailored Italian suits, and at Euro 2000 press conferences he demonstrates an excellent use of the language. (His English is also excellent, and this tournament he has occasionally assisted his translator, the cricket-loving Dutch press officer Rob de Leede.)

In Italy, as Cruyff notes with a certain wonder, what matters is winning. Rijkaard imbibed that. Why, I asked him, did Holland switch recently from white shorts to the black ones they wore in the 1970s?

'This all sounds a bit airy,' said Rijkaard, 'because it's not about the shorts, but I felt that black emits more power. White: clean, neat and attractive, attractive football. Black is that you throw yourself in front of the ball in the last minute and prevent a goal. It's a feeling. That's why I chose it.'

Until this week, this was all just talk. Only at Euro 2000 is Rijkaard starting to prove himself. For two years beforehand his team played only friendlies. At one point they went 16 months without winning a game, making him Holland's least successful manager since 1951. The leader of the far-left Socialist Party demanded his dismissal.

Rijkaard experimented endlessly, yet began Euro 2000 with a shaky 1-0 win against the Czech Republic. He then dropped Clarence Seedorf, who had also been dropped by Rijkaard's predecessor, Guus Hiddink, after the first match of the World Cup. The first half of Holland's second game, against Denmark, was scoreless and depressing. Then Rijkaard brought on Ronald de Boer for Marc Overmars, and moved Boudewijn Zenden to the left wing. Now Holland were playing with ten of the players who had started the semi-final of the World Cup against Brazil under Hiddink two years ago, nine of them playing in the same positions they had then. Almost instantly the Dutch scored three goals.

In the game against France, a somewhat makeshift team played a recognisable version of Hiddink's system. What, then, has Rijkaard contributed? 'The core was clear even then,' he admits. The style, too, has scarcely changed. The Dutch school - one-touch passing, use of the wings, attack - dates back to the 1960s and was restored by Cruyff when he became manager of Ajax in 1985. Rijkaard, a member of the Dutch footballing establishment, does not question it.

But he aims to add a crucial nuance: defence. This Dutch side is more calculating than most of its predecessors. Frank de Boer sticks behind his defence almost like an Italian sweeper, Ronald de Boer dived to win a crucial penalty against the Czechs, and the keepers have been hitting long punts at Patrick Kluivert's head. So far it has worked: after going 3-2 up against France with an hour to play, Holland slowed down the game and barely gave away a chance - it would have done a good German side proud.

Rijkaard has achieved something else: he has made the Dutch camp perhaps the most harmonious of Euro 2000. The foreign stereotype that the Dutch are about to start eating each other is just that - a foreign stereotype. This week Seedorf told an Italian newspaper that the Dutch press is racist, but even a statement as raw as that failed to split the players into two camps of rival colours, as briefly happened at Euro 96.

'Guus Hiddink tore down that barrier,' Rijkaard told me. 'I have continued his line. Keeping an eye on who sits at which table at meals, seeing who rooms with whom. I made Edgar Davids vice-captain. Nothing to do with colour, just because he was playing excellently and because he lives like an athlete. But those are all details that change things in the group. The relations are now totally equal.'

Rijkaard deserves great credit for this. It is not simply that he is half black and half white, in the same way that as a coach he is part Dutch and part Italian. It is also that he is an impressive character.

Everyone respects him. The black players grew up with his poster on their walls. No one would ever suspect him of pandering to anyone. He may not be a great coach, but there is general agreement that he is a good man.

As we leave his office, he shows me a card bearing a Chinese character that was given him by Chinese journalists. 'It's my name in Chinese,' he says. 'At least I hope it's my name in Chinese. It might be a curse.'

Rijkaard could win Euro 2000 and still be cursed. His compatriots want Holland to attack. Winning alone is not enough. Italy were lauded at home for winning their first three games in cowardly fashion. But as Rijkaard presumably knows, Holland is not Italy. In Holland, the suits, the food and the defenders are all much worse.